If you are hoping to be part of a community - any community - a good starting point is to respect and be tolerant of the views of other members .... even if they differ from your own. In fact, especially if they differ from your own.

I have lost patience with people like you and Rob who lament the quasi-demise of film to the point where you make illogical and overly emotional statements. Digital is here, both as an art and as an industry, and if you don't like it then do something else. Nobody is forcing you to take pictures. Paint, write, watch TV, but for crying out loud stop whining about digital.

Logged

"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new landscapes, but in having new eyes." Marcel Proust

It goes without saying that you are welcome to disagree with me but I just want to point out that I am not so much talking about just the photographer end of things, but the broader industry-wide implications.

Walter,

We seem to agree a lot more often than we disagree, but this is one time we don't agree. I loved doing darkroom work too, except for cleaning up at the end of the session, and I miss even simple things like loading cassettes from bulk film, and bringing a 2 1/4 x 2 1/4 roll of Ektachrome out of the tank and looking closely at the soft, understated, fantastic color (which would then fade to nothing within a very few years).

I'm sorry to see Kodak go under. It was a great outfit, and with its "You push the button, we do the rest" it started the move toward where we are today. I'm sure there were plenty of successful pictorialists who were just as cranked about that stab-in-the-back as today's film photographers are about digital. Kodak even invented digital photography, then turned its back, or at least its side, on it. Kodak's demise is a major part of the industry-wide implications you've mentioned, but in Kodak's case, and in the case of several other outfits, the demise resembles suicide more than it resembles murder.

I miss the darkroom and many other peculiarities of film, but I'd never go back to film. Digital is a huge step forward.

I have lost patience with people like you and Rob who lament the quasi-demise of film to the point where you make illogical and overly emotional statements. Digital is here, both as an art and as an industry, and if you don't like it then do something else. Nobody is forcing you to take pictures. Paint, write, watch TV, but for crying out loud stop whining about digital.

Frankly, I fail to see what there is to be a problem. I just looked back through all 295 of my posts and the ONLY TWO that relate in any way to a Film / Digital discussion are in this very thread. Not a great volume to lose the patience over. And, to those able to comprehend my statements they were no so much a lament as an observation.

Hi Colin, You're not alone. The only way really to learn the difference is to spend a lot of time looking at the work of the great street photographers. Some of the greats are included in the annotated bibliography I've posted at http://www.russ-lewis.com/Bib/Bib.html. People in that list to concentrate on are: Andre Kertesz, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Doisneau, Willy Ronis, Brassai, Walker Evans, Elliott Erwitt, Marc Riboud, Helen Levitt, Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, and Vivian Maier, with special emphasis on Cartier-Bresson and Frank.

I wrote those articles last year and finally gave up trying to finding a publisher.

In my own estimation, street photography has fallen on hard times since the demise of photojournalism magazines like Life and Look, but it's still out there, and there still are people doing it well. Obviously, Siegfried Hanson is one of them.

Hi Russ, thanks for the link to your essay. You write "A good street photograph is a story, though the story may be confusing or even one you'll never be able to decipher". I would like a add another opinion, which is from the other end of the spectrum. Garry Winogrand said "I think there isn't a photograph in the word that has a narrative ability". His reasoning is that "all a photograph ever does is to describe light on surface. That's all there is".

IMHO that's exactly where the difference between documentary and street photography lies. The latter doesn't have any intentions to show more than what the subject looks like. Documentary photography by itself, i.e. without accompanying words, doesn't exist in my opinion. Simply for the fact that a story lies at the heart of a documentary which doesn't exists in a photograph by itself.

Yes, I've seen that clip before, and it's a good one, even though the quality leaves something to be desired.

Well, Garry's right. But I can say the same thing about the Mona Lisa. It's just light reflected off paint on a surface. I also agree with you that documentary photography isn't documentary unless it's accompanied by words -- at least I'd agree that photojournalism isn't anything without journalism. On the other hand, I'd never agree with Garry or anybody else that no photograph has narrative ability. Maybe I only see the narrative here because I was there, but I don't think that's the reason.

On the other hand, I'd never agree with Garry or anybody else that no photograph has narrative ability. Maybe I only see the narrative here because I was there, but I don't think that's the reason.

The "narrative ability" is in the mind of the viewer (and also of the artist, although that is another story).

The mind looks for stories, in the world around it and in images whether they be paintings, drawings or photographs. This probably starts with sociobiology - there is obvious survival value in detecting stories which include threats or possible advantages. But then nurture and culture take over - we know that images sometimes tell stories so we look for them and we have available a rich repertoire of possible stories, whether they be religious as in much of western painting, sexual as in a some street photography, or in a broad sense political, as (to my mind) in Russ's fine image.

Of course the mind doesn't always find much of a story and that isn't necessarily a problem. The mind also looks for formal elements (beauty, if you like). There may also be a sociobiological context for that, to do with sexual selection, although I find such arguments a bit thin, and nurture and culture are certainly in play. I find mostly formal qualities in Siegfried Hansen's fine work, although there is an underlying story about the urban environment, and the lovely visual pun in the homepage image is a kind of story. I would argue that there is always a kind of story in the experienced image because the mind is so assiduous in looking for one. The ghosts of landscape which many people perceive in abstract painting are cases in point. And sometimes the story is the absence of story.

I am stretching the definition of "story" in this line of argument but I would argue that it is a legitimate stretch. For example, current thinking about landscape has it that there is an underlying "story" in all images of landscape, whether it be about wilderness, or gardens, or the inside and the outside, or danger, or power, or the human and the non-human. Stories don't have to have a lot of detail. Maybe "content" is a better word.

What I have said about the mind of the viewer applies, mutatis mutandis, to the mind of the artist.

Wow! And here I always thought you looked at a picture and either got something from it or not. I had no idea there was so much sociobiological significance involved. And nurture and culture too. . . Damn! It's clear I'll have to go back to school and learn all this stuff before I can continue shooting on the street.

Damn! It's clear I'll have to go back to school and learn all this stuff before I can continue shooting on the street.

Oh please. I thought we were having an intelligent conversation here - and one in which I expressed agreement with your viewpoint and admiration for your photograph. Do you really believe that the fact that you happen never to have thought something means that it isn't worth thinking or expressing?In retrospect, a bit of a hissy fit. Withdrawn.